Of course there were lynchings in the West, as there have been everywhere. The classic case, spawner of dozens of yarns, is that of Henry Plummer, who, while serving as sheriff of both Bannack and Virginia City, Montana, secretly led a gang of highwaymen responsible for murdering a reputed one hundred and two people. l do not believe the figure, but no matter; it is only costuming anyway. The body of the matter lay in the formation of a vigilance committee to restore order.

As these self-constituted lawmen of Virginia City were riding forth on their errand, they encountered a hoodlum named Erastus Yeager, better known as Red. Red was tried -- no outsider ever knew of what the trial consisted -- and was induced to confess -- no one ever knew how. He was then executed before the men he had accused could confront him. That done, the vigilantes swept on through the countryside, hanging the men Yeager had named without corroboration to trees, rafters, corral gates, any upright that was handy.

These events occurred late in December, 1863, and early in January, 1864. For one hundred years since then the same apology has been repeated over and over, inasmuch as crooks controlled the apparatus of law enforcement, what other recourse did honest men have?

The rhetorical question prompts another in retort; What else did they ever try? Might there be a story in someone's standing up to voice a protest? But no, the leaning gallows, the whistle of wind through the lonesome places, the grim march of the defenders to the place of retribution -- the costuming always wins. And yet, two lawyers in Virginia City did raise the issue of trial by jury and were told by the vigilantes either to keep quiet or leave. Why is that footnote always overlooked?

I know of only one searching novel about a Western lynching, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, and it is content with the obvious theme, the possibility that self-directed avengers might in their righteousness be wrong and execute innocent men. There is room for other themes. When Henry Plummer died at rope's end in Bannack, the American Bill of Rights had been in force for seventy-two years. By now, one hundred and seventy-seven years have passed, which is long enough, it would seem, for certain rights to have become traditions of our time. And when suddenly the times were out of joint, was there in those desolate mountain places no Hamlet frozen with horror at what he was being called on to do? No Brutus, lured on to disaster by his own lofty idealism?

A Macbeth existed, I think. Although the point is seldom dwelt on in tales about Plummer, there lived in Bannack during those times one Sidney Edgerton, Abraham Lincoln's appointee as chief justice of Idaho Territory. (Montana in 1863 was a part of newly created Idaho.) Edgerton's nephew, Colonel Wilber F. Sanders, was one of the moving spirits of the vigilantes, albeit he seems to have stayed behind when they went on their rides. Justice Edgerton, surely a representative of the law that is said not to have existed, knew perfectly well what his nephew and the other vigilantes were up to. He uttered no protest, however. Instead he went to Washington and urged that Montana be established as a separate territory, partly on the grounds that law and order would be better served by a division from Idaho. Congress acceded, and when Lincoln selected a governor for the new territory, it turned out to be -- that's right -- Sidney Edgerton. So perhaps there were witches whispering of ambition across the caldron. Yet all we hear is that vigilantes did only what they had to do in order to preserve fundamental values.

The tale that needs writing is not the one about gangs who kill one hundred and two people nor about the pursuit of such gangs nor about the hanging of their leaders. That's the motion. The story lurks in whatever it was that flickered behind the eyes of the men who did the executing or who declined to do it -- a jury of frightened men who had followed a gleam of hope from familiarity into strangeness and who one day raised their heads from their digging to find that the traditions and customs by which they had long abided were suddenly gone. Only blind luckre mained. The next turn of the shovel might make them wealthier than they had ever before dreamed of being. Or they might starve. But you cannot punish chance. All you can punish, vicariously enough in your reading sometimes, is the threat you can see, the Plummers of the world. And so you assert yourself. Who are you? Ah, you are the savior. Marching with the vigilantes, you grasp for your integrity through emptiness and you catch... what?

It's a marvelous story, really. Someday it should be told. This brings us to the final stumbling block, the problem of relevance. As one drives across the plains and comes abruptly onto the new industrial cities that are rising dramatically against the backdrop of the Rockies -- Great Falls, Montana, say, or Denver or Colorado Springs -- the notion of finding pertinence in what happened there during a different century seems all at once absurd. And when one drives on into the high country and sees the summer carnival towns -- Central City west of Denver or reconstructed Virginia City in Montana -- and when one watches the tawdry make-believe with which they try, for the price of a tourist's dollar, to revivify what they all call in capital letters The Old West, the idea of a literature out of such materials seems doubly frantic.

But such hesitations miss the point. There are other relevancies for writing than contemporaneousness. The possibility of being dated never bothered Homer or Shakespeare or, to an extent, Faulkner. They were dwelling on themes that could be enlarged most fully by turning from modernity to mythic periods -- periods when, the reader is ready to believe, life was lived according to its elements, when there were no limits to what could be achieved, and when, accordingly, there were also completely wanton freedoms of impulse and passion; when crime grew enormous not by statistic but by its unrestrained denial of the calls of humanity -- a time when standards were changing as rapidly as they are now; when fatalism seemed, as it does today, the only possible explanation for the disasters that befall men; when naked self-love openly challenged self-command for supremacy; when King Lear's daughters could, as their heirs do now, tear out eyes without the least twinge of conscience -- and when the response to all this is created page by page in the hearts of readers who see in the shadows of that gigantic past the universal present.

The violent West is America's mythic land. Someday some young writer who does not flee from its stereotype as DeVoto did, who does not feel he must always seek the shield of literalness, and who refuses to yield to the seductions along the way, will see it so, and then with hard granitic style will dig it free from beneath the ash heaps of a century of foolish composition.